How Kevin Rudd’s campaign unravelled

If Kevin Rudd had had three years to plan his comeback to the Labor leadership, he surely would have had a cohesive campaign strategy as well. What had he been doing?. Photo: Andrew Meares

Pamela Williams

Inside the Labor leadership saga

Killing Julia: how Kevin Rudd got even – As then Prime Minister Julia Gillard addressed the glittering Midwinter Ball at Parliament House on June 19, Kevin Rudd – desperate to knife Gillard – was upstairs with Bill Shorten making his pitch to return to the leadership.

Kill Kevin: the untold story of a coup – Julia Gillard’s ascent to the prime ministership followed an almost flawless campaign ignited by a small handful of Labor MPs. But it involved some seasoned players too, as well as an explosive campaign by wealthy mining titans, and some subtle manoeuvring by old Labor hands.

The unelectable man walked across the stage of a hotel ballroom. Against a backdrop of iridescent blue with four Australian flags, he claimed the prime ministership with a mandate the likes of which had not been won by Conservatives for 17 years.

As Tony Abbott’s supporters screamed the room down at Sydney’s Four Season’s Hotel they also buried the last vestige of a terrible three year-experiment on the other side – a saga which had seen a Labor government destroy two of its own prime ministers before flaming out itself.

“Tony, Tony, Tony,” the Liberal crowd shouted. Typically, some wept. “I can inform you that the government of Australia has changed,” Abbott began, with the rest of his words drowned out. A one-time journalist and a man who had won his party’s leadership in 2009 by one vote, Abbott had defied the calculated demonisation by three previous Labor prime ministers – Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and then Kevin Rudd again – to march improbably to victory.

In the hours before arriving on stage, Abbott had closeted himself in a suite on the 34th floor of the hotel with the Liberal’s federal director Brian Loughnane, the pollster and strategist Mark Textor, Abbott’s chief of staff and the wife of Loughnane, Peta Credlin, and, for a period, the party’s former leader and prime minister of almost 12 years, John Howard as they counted in the vote.

Abbott had had, for the previous five weeks, a political campaign machine which ran with the unblinking focus of a hungry man on the last mile. They had built a strategy around fighting Gillard, but anticipated always a return to Rudd. They had shifted their sights from one to the next. Liberal campaign experts had sometimes joked to each other that public antipathy to Gillard meant they needed only to hang her photo on walls around the country and then sit back; but when it came to Rudd, they believed his messianic self-belief and micro-managing style would soon emerge to remind voters of why they too had lost faith in him the first time around.

The ruthless manner in which Rudd had been despatched by his own side in 2010 had laid the seeds. His successor Gillard had never explained why Rudd had been destroyed. Had she done so – invoking the tale of dysfunctional management which seeped out in any case – then Gillard might have at least partially headed off the public traction which Rudd was able to invoke later as a victim, and a prime ministerial victim moreover, unjustly dealt with.

A Liberal party document provided by a friendly psychiatrist suggested Rudd was held together by one key strut: an absolute conviction of intellectual superiority over everyone else.

Photo: Andrew Meares

The Liberal strategy to turn the focus to Rudd’s dysfunction was supported by a secret tactical tool.

Held deep within the top strategy group of the Liberal war room was a document which gave a name and a diagnosis to the personality of Kevin Rudd. It was a document provided to the Liberal’s strategy team on an informal basis by a psychiatrist friendly to the Liberals after Rudd had returned to the Labor leadership on June 26. In a nutshell, this document offered an arm’s-length diagnosis of Rudd as suffering a personality disorder known as “grandiose narcissism”.

Informal check-list

The document was not shown to Abbott, but rather remained within the strategy group as an informal check-list, often as a tool for comparison after Rudd had already behaved in ways that the Liberal strategists believed could be leveraged to their advantage. The Liberal war room had reached its own conclusions about Rudd long ago, based on his public behaviour and the damning revelations of his colleagues.

But the document provided an affirmation that the snapshot of the enemy on which a fighting campaign was based had a context. It listed recognisable symptoms and behavioural patterns linking Rudd’s personality to the clinical symptoms for grandiose narcissism – drawing conclusions about Rudd’s mindset. It also proposed tactics to leverage Rudd’s personality.

Describing grandiose narcissism as less a psychiatric disease and more a destructive character defect, the document suggested Rudd was held together by one key strut: an absolute conviction of intellectual superiority over everyone else. “Kick out that strut and he will collapse; basically he is a self-centred two-year-old in an adult body. Prone to wanting everything – now! If not, then he has a two year-old’s tantrum.”

Rudd, the document went on, was vulnerable to any challenge to his self-belief that he was more widely-read, smarter and more knowledgeable than anyone else “on the planet”. Such a condition of grandiose narcissism would make Rudd obsessively paranoid, excessively vindictive – “prepared to wait years to get revenge”, and “a spineless bully” who would strike an easy target; he would predictably be excessively sensitive to personal criticism. If publicly goaded, he could easily have a “mega tantrum”. If described as “stupid”, such a personality would mount an almost impenetrable intellectual defence. If undermined in front of an audience, with his intellect undermined, Rudd could be prone to “narcissistic rage”.

While Labor fed a storyline (ultimately proved incorrect) that the enemy, Tony Abbott, was so disliked as to be unelectable, the Liberals fed a storyline about Rudd that was ultimately proved correct.

Photo: Andrew Meares

“Later, in attempts to repair the damage, he will claim, in the calmest, coolest and most reasonable way, that his meltdown occurred because those around him are ganging up on him to prevent him from ‘saving Australia’ or some other such grandiose concept.

“Kevin’s explanation for the meltdown will run something like this: ‘Under the difficulties I face trying to save this country from the terrible threats facing it, any reasonable person would have naturally reacted the way I did.’ And then, blah blah, with grandiose ideas of being the country’s saviour.”

Rudd would be threatened by a rival in any of his fields and would be obsessively paranoid and ready to retaliate to real or perceived threats; he would suffer from excessive suspicion. This could be tactically exploited, the document suggested, by promoting the idea that Rudd was merely a caretaker prime minister, to be terminated by colleagues once the election was won.

Feeding political storylines

Inside the Liberal war room the document explained why Rudd “knew best” and “why he had to take over” again as prime minister. And while the document went to explaining behaviour, it also aided the development of pressure points against Rudd – such as pushing the notion that he was full of flimflam, an accusation designed to undermine a superiority complex. The document was a confirmation that many of the tactics and strategic assessments in the war room were on the mark. It crystallised a view of Rudd rather than creating a framework, confirming views of his likely behaviour – a crucial weapon in the psychological warfare of an election campaign.

While Labor fed a storyline (ultimately proved incorrect) that the enemy, Abbott, was so disliked as to be unelectable, the Liberals fed a storyline (ultimately proved correct) that the enemy, Rudd, was so assured of his own superior ability that his campaign would become mired in chaos as he micro-managed and displayed suspicions of those outside his own small cult circle.

The document – simple in its construct and in many ways echoing a view clearly held inside Labor itself where many of Rudd’s colleagues had described him as dysfunctional – raised a riddle no one could answer; if the symptoms were all so obvious and the character flaws so marked, how was it that Labor had chosen Rudd not once, but twice to lead the country?

If Rudd could be interpreted as a grandiose narcissist, then he could not bear to be ignored. He would demand on cue, “Mr Abbott must respond!”

Tony Abbott and shadow immigration minister Scott Morrison in August. Pollster Mark Textor’s in 2010 developed the lines: “Stop the boats, end the waste, remove the pressure on families”.

Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

The Liberal machine had found its feet quickly, running smoothly in the first few days by contrast with the wobbles of the early days in 2010. The research was tied to the message and the message – known as “the mantra” – was tied to the candidate. Like John Howard in 1996, Abbott was disciplined, focused and operating comfortably in a framework where everyone had their eye on the same goal working from a unified script.

In 2010, Mark Textor’s research had developed the lines: “Stop the boats, end the waste, remove the pressure on families.” This mantra was fine-tuned for 2013, to “stop the boats and end the carbon tax”, but essentially it was the same message.

Boat people and the economy played consistently to Abbott’s mantra. Abbott, without venturing into dangerous territory, could maintain the same slogans, or new versions, that he had repeated since the last election. Rudd, however, crossed back and forth across the line; he would remain for much of the election campaign fighting on the Coalition’s turf, and then episodically producing startling new policies that played poorly in the media and sent panic waves through his own campaign headquarters. Proposals such as a changed economic zone for the Northern Territory had no resonance in the general campaign message and instead became the subject of ridicule.

With the return of Rudd, many of the Liberals’ internal armchair critics had urged Loughnane to get out ahead with a major attack on Rudd. But the judgment went the other way. A fusillade during Rudd’s honeymoon, as he dashed from happy mob scene to even happier mob scene and was sufficiently self-absorbed to post photographs of himself with shaving cuts on social media, could create a backlash. Far better to let him just burn himself out as he surely would, spinning faster and faster. If this was a cruel character assessment, it was, nevertheless, simply the astringency of a focused campaign war machine sizing up an opponent presenting himself as a clever nerd.

Rudd’s poll jump seen as a honeymoon

Experienced campaign strategists (and critics from his own side of politics), often described Rudd as a “front-runner” to define his performance with the wind in his sails. In the immediate aftermath of seizing the prime ministership back from Gillard, Rudd was high in the polls and high in general. Behind the scenes, the Liberal campaign machine assessed Rudd’s huge poll jump as a honeymoon, relief at the departure of Gillard, and excitement at change. They did not, however, confuse it with voting intent.

One small ad aired by the Liberals on the day Rudd was re-elected leader and thus Prime Minister, went to Rudd’s past chaotic management style. After that, Rudd’s own behaviour, racing from one thing to the next, talking of “gotta zip” began to deliver the same message directly.

Evidence that things were breaking down inside the Rudd campaign came sooner than any had anticipated. It was only the end of the second week when the first news features surfaced, revealing a breakdown with the Labor campaign general – George Wright – struggling to maintain any cohesive links with the Prime Minister’s increasingly independent strategy development.

Liberal strategists had assumed Labor had a strong campaign in Gillard’s office built around her legacy. But had the Rudd campaign burned it?

Photo: AFP

In the war room, Loughnane and his senior strategists listened in amazement as leaks from the Labor campaign gathered in force and frequency. Clearly there was a massive fiasco unfolding; no disciplined campaign could unravel so quickly – with media reports of chaos and dysfunction, right down to bus trips to unscheduled destinations – if the campaign was in good fighting shape.

Loughnane and his deputy Julian Scheezel had assumed Labor had had a strong campaign plan in Gillard’s office built around Gillard’s legacy. Had they burned it? This only gave rise to another question; if Rudd had had three years to plan his comeback, he surely would have had a cohesive campaign strategy as well. What had he been doing?

Rudd’s return to the prime ministership had meant a period of adjustment for the Liberals and for Abbott. The campaign strategy, which had always anticipated Rudd’s comeback, was in place. But they had to adjust and turn the dials to a new way of fighting. Rudd would be a different foe to Gillard. They believed that Rudd would quickly default – to be all “show”, by contrast with Gillard, judged in Liberal HQ to be a fighter.

At the heart of the Coalition strategy to destroy Rudd was a conviction that the voting public, having witnessed Rudd’s restoration by the self-same colleagues who had dumped him at a few hours’ notice in 2010, would hope that he would not be “the old Rudd”. The public would have hope, and a suspension of disbelief. This would create an expectations gap – particularly if the media reported positively any announcements or stunts by Rudd that were mainly theatre. These would not gel with advertising and other messaging from head office.

The more Rudd pushed the performance, the wider would be the gap with everyday life. The Liberal message around this would be that Rudd was just more flim-flam.

Message could afford to be positive

The Liberals own campaign advertising would be almost 70 per cent positive. In previous campaigns, ferocious negative advertising had accounted for most of the expenditure. This time, however, the message could afford to be more positive. With Rudd’s campaign unfocused and lacking cohesion, the Liberals would use the ads to affirm Abbott’s campaign slogans of stability and a “plan” for the country. This would contrast with a growing disconnect on the Labor side between Rudd’s twin messages of attacking Abbott while announcing largely undeveloped “thought bubble” policies such as the sudden declaration that the Navy could move from Garden Island in Sydney to Brisbane.

With no advertising to support the idea and no indication of any third party support (such as the Navy), this idea withered on the vine overnight. But behind the scenes, it was a catastrophe for Labor. At the same time that he accused Abbott of wanting to cut jobs, Rudd was cutting jobs. In Sydney, all any Labor candidate could see was 4000 local job losses sprayed around on the evening news. They could almost hear campaign workers fainting in Labor HQ.

When Rudd slapped down a Christian pastor on the ABC’s Q & A program who had directly challenged him about his turnaround on gay marriage, it was the aggressive slap-down that made the news, sucking the oxygen from an otherwise comfortable performance by Rudd.

For the Liberals it was simply more confirmation that Rudd’s personality meant that he would not tolerate any challenge to his own position. Rudd could not handle being put under pressure. He had bounced through the 2007 election, running a disciplined campaign against a tired government, attracting little scrutiny from his opponents. Now, in 2013, he was trying to fight the 2007 election again – but this time with scrutiny. No sooner had his polls started to turn south, than Rudd had become erratic.

Rudd campaign adviser Bruce Hawker ... With the change to Rudd, the Labor campaign was decapitated and many ministerial staffers left too. Rudd’s and Hawker’s focus was also clear.

Photo: Andrew Meares

While Loughnane had re-tooled a campaign that remained unfinished business from 2010, sharpening it with all that Labor had delivered with three years of leadership dysfunction, Labor’s own campaign director had been forced to develop two campaigns in the one year – even as he prepared to direct a national election campaign himself for the first time.

George Wright’s first campaign for 2013 had been developed around Gillard and her achievements, the building blocks of a Labor legacy which she would fight for tooth and nail. With the demise of Gillard, however, the page had turned. Neither Gillard nor Rudd wished to honour the other. As each left the stage, or came around again, a new narrative was developed.

For Wright, it meant a fresh start on a different track. And it meant largely re-doing a campaign which had been secretly war-gamed just five weeks before Gillard fell. From June 12 to 14, Wright had assembled his entire campaign staff in Labor’s Melbourne campaign headquarters. It was a dress rehearsal which had not leaked, notwithstanding 150 attendees, a fully-staffed practise machine, including top ministerial staff and operatives from across the party. It included the senior advisers from Gillard’s office, IT officials and desk-top computers and laptops. This mock campaign ran through the apparatus of basic campaign operations: the issues, the way to get the message out, how to keep the leader’s campaign front and centre, supported at all times; advertising, lines of authority, social media management, communication with constituencies and stakeholders and third party supporters for policies.

Dry run wasted

It was designed to bring everyone into a campaign setting, to kick the tyres, to find the problems. The key advertisement that would spearhead the campaign for Rudd’s re-election instead was developed: “He wins, you lose.” It was made for Gillard.

With the change to Rudd, the campaign was decapitated with a third of the staff leaving. As seven ministers refused to serve with Rudd, many of their own staffers left too; Gillard loyalists were pushed aside, senior staff from the Prime Minister’s office were all gone. The dry run, which had put the campaign on a war footing for Gillard, had been wasted.

Rudd’s and Hawker’s focus was clear. Rudd wanted to break the nexus with the past and create an offensive campaign not dependent on the Gillard legacy. He wanted not just a new strategy, but new advertisements too; almost everything on standby had been constructed around Gillard.

Even with the phone hook-up connections daily to the top Labor leadership group, Rudd’s own hand remained firmly on the tiller at all times, micro-managing both the smallest and the biggest issues, conveying little trust outside his own inner sanctum.

Rudd with wife Therese Rein (left) ... As the 2013 campaign got under way there were quickly murmurings that Rudd’s own family was over-represented at the pointy end of the campaign strategy.

Photo: Andrew Meares

As he prepared for the critical first campaign debate against Abbott on a Sunday, Rudd demanded reports on the status of target seats in Queensland, refusing to allow either regional campaign directors or the Melbourne CHQ to retain control. The last of four reports was delivered to him at noon before the debate.

As the 2013 campaign got under way there were quickly murmurings that Rudd’s own family was over-represented at the pointy end of the campaign strategy. His wife Therese Rein, it was rumoured, was helping with the messages, his son was said to be working on the ads; old Labor hands from the Gillard camp quietly retold third-hand reports .

Mostly, the Gillard hard-heads tried to remain quiet. They would not retaliate against Rudd while Labor was fighting for its life. That could come later, or at any rate, in the dying days. Most had one clear objective: to give Rudd a trouble-free campaign. They would stay quiet and not look for praise for doing so. To behave any other way would “normalise” what they believed Rudd had done to Gillard.

But still, there were stories of Rudd’s plane being diverted at short notice constantly to new “opportunities”. It ensured that the advance teams – charged with protecting a leader from standing in front of signs marked EXIT, or from protesters with furled up banners looking for a moment in the cameras – could not do their work.

Rudd sidelined campaign war room

By the end of the campaign, the disconnection between Rudd’s campaign plane – as his travelling group was known – and the Labor campaign HQ was out in the open. Rudd had sidelined the massive Labor campaign war room, taking personal control with his family and a tiny ring of trusted acolytes – a Royal family micro-managing the campaign in competition with the Labor machine. George Wright had joined the campaign plane himself for a period, trying to get the show back on the road.

In the second last week of the campaign, in a move which was perhaps the worst disaster to befall any campaign in recent memory, Rudd, together with Finance Minister Penny Wong and Treasurer Chris Bowen, attempted to co-opt two government departments into an attack on the Coalition policy costings. In a mesmerising performance, the heads of both Treasury and the Finance Department publicly repudiated Rudd.

Reports in Liberal HQ suggested that Labor candidates everywhere had begun pleading with their local voters not to throw them out. Many distanced themselves from Labor. There were purple posters, green posters, campaign workers dressed up in blue and no Labor logos for some.

Loughnane retaliated with TV advertising telling voters to take a look behind the local candidate to find Rudd.

The Liberal Party had a suite of advertising built around the attacks of 2012 on Rudd by colleagues including then treasurer Wayne Swan.

Photo: Glenn Hunt

In the 1996 election campaign, the Liberal war machine had been forced to interact ferociously with Paul Keating as prime minister. With his provocative intellect and history of driving economic reform – even if this had created fatigue in the electorate – Keating was a fierce foe. The six-week duel fought between Keating and John Howard had seen the Liberal campaign constantly adjust to Keating as the brawl raged to the finale. Gillard too, had created a brawl in 2010. Notwithstanding the bungling of messages (such as Real Julia), and the campaign misfires such as Gillard’s Citizens Assembly, she was accepted as a fighter. She could force a campaign conversation.

In 2013, the Liberal campaign could pick up unfinished business, prosecuting an extension of the 2010 campaign. The hung parliament of 2010, together with the escalation of hostilities between Gillard and Rudd which had crippled that election campaign, had signalled the start of three years of chronic instability.

Loughnane sought to counter this “instability” with a seemingly anodyne TV ad, running throughout this year, on the Liberals’ “positive plan”. It matched the “real solutions” book issued earlier in the year. These were hardly developments to light a fire of excitement but they were not intended to. They were supposed to convey steadiness and focus. They sat in the mix, with Abbott’s determined position not to be pushed into responding to an agenda orchestrated by either Gillard or Rudd.

Abbott’s mantras became repetitive

“We’ll stop the boats,” Abbott droned endlessly. “We’ll get rid of debt,” he went on. Loughnane had a suite of advertising built around the attacks of 2012 on Rudd by colleagues including then treasurer Wayne Swan with whom Rudd had bitterly fallen out, and Simon Crean. They had called him dysfunctional; he was not a team player. They had all but called him a chaotic narcissist. Loughnane would not use these advertisements. By the close of the 2013 campaign, Rudd was doing the job himself.

Abbott’s formulaic public mantras and the sense of consistency this was intended to invoke became repetitive to the point of tedium. But it was the point of the exercise. Abbott was not going to “zip” or to buzz from the world stage to a new thought bubble on an issue hitherto not on the public radar – and then back again – all in the one day. This was the territory of Rudd; the more Rudd ran around fixing and announcing and creating mob scenes, the more he fitted into a “chaos” story.

With one significant exception which made waves – Abbott’s personal commitment to a vast and extravagant paid parental leave policy – Abbott continued to prosecute a case of returning the nation to stability after chaos.

Kevin Rudd had given birth to the idea that he could be mobbed by a plate of lamingtons but in the end baseball bats were brought out.

Photo: Reuters

For Labor, the dreadful finale of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd wars meant that each sought to distance themselves from the other’s legacy. Gillard had spoken of a good government that had lost its way – a notion always unexplained. Rudd simply campaigned on other issues, leaving Gillard’s signature issue of disability care mainly as a sidebar to the campaign. When he did take this up, there was sometimes a hiccup. A visit to disability centre in Hasluck was marked by Rudd arriving characteristically an hour late. His apology was politely accepted, but some attendees had waited in wheelchairs for an hour, a message that soon made it back to campaign HQ. It was simply symptomatic.

Kevin Rudd, after years of towing the media to scenes where he was mobbed by old ladies in retirement homes, by school children on the street and at back yard barbecues, had given birth to the idea that he could be mobbed by a plate of lamingtons. In the end, however, keys had quietly turned in the locks of closets across the nations as baseball bats were brought out.

In a farewell speech stretching 22 minutes on Saturday night, Rudd made his pitch as a fighter who had saved the furniture for the Labor Party. His disappointment etched in a perma-smile, Rudd’s own bravura belief in himself, which had stretched to hopes of victory, had finally met its match.

The Labor Party had started the campaign with a very popular leader and concluded it with a very unpopular leader. Tony Abbott, vilified as a throwback and worse, instead had won the mandate from the mob.